{"id":47996,"date":"2016-06-28T01:41:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T01:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47996"},"modified":"2016-06-28T01:41:00","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T01:41:00","slug":"white-savior-rape-and-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47996","title":{"rendered":"White Savior, Rape and Romance?"},"content":{"rendered":"

White Savior, Rape and Romance?<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2016-06-27<\/p>\n

Charles M. Blow<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The movie \u201cFree State of Jones<\/a>\u201d certainly doesn\u2019t lack in ambition \u2014 it sprawls so that it feels like several films stitched together \u2014 but I still found it woefully lacking.<\/p>\n

The story itself is quite interesting. It\u2019s about Newton Knight<\/a>, a white man in Mississippi<\/a> during and after the Civil War<\/a>, who organizes and mounts a somewhat successful rebellion against the Confederacy<\/a>. He falls in love with a mixed-race slave named Rachel, and they establish a small community of racially ambiguous relatives that a book of the same title calls \u201cwhite Negroes.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is easy to see why this story would appeal to Hollywood executives. It has a bit of everything, with eerie echoes of modern issues.<\/p>\n

It comes in the wake of \u201c12 Years a Slave<\/a>,\u201d at a time when slave narratives are en vogue, only this story emphasizes white heroism and centers on the ally instead of the enslaved.<\/p>\n

It tries desperately to cast the Civil War, and specifically dissent within the Confederacy, as more a populism-versus-elitism class struggle in which poor white men were forced to fight a rich white man\u2019s war and protect the cotton trade, rather than equally a conflict about the moral abhorrence of black slavery.<\/p>\n

Throughout, there is the white liberal insistence that race is merely a subordinate construction of class, with Newt himself saying at the burial of poor white characters, \u201csomehow, some way, sometime, everybody is just somebody else\u2019s nigger.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, by extension, there is the lingering suggestion of post-racialism because, as the author Victoria E. Bynum<\/a> writes in the book\u2019s<\/a> preface, the relationship between Newt and Rachel \u201cadded the specter of interracial intimacy to the story.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White Savior, Rape and Romance? The New York Times 2016-06-27 Charles M. Blow The movie \u201cFree State of Jones\u201d certainly doesn\u2019t lack in ambition \u2014 it sprawls so that it feels like several films stitched together \u2014 but I still found it woefully lacking. The story itself is quite interesting. It\u2019s about Newton Knight, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,459,8,1459,6940,20],"tags":[15262,2640,1457,1456,2327,1453,1454],"class_list":["post-47996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-history","category-media-archive","category-mississippi","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-charles-m-blow","tag-new-york-times","tag-newt-knight","tag-newton-knight","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-victoria-bynum","tag-victoria-e-bynum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47997,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47996\/revisions\/47997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}